Tess Gallagher (BA 1967, MA 1971) received a Distinguished
Alumnus Award from the UW College of Arts and Sciences at
the College’s Celebration of Distinction on May 20, 2004.
Following are her remarks and reading:

Asking the Unasked Question

First, I’d like to thank Dean Hodge and those of
the alumnae committee and the English Department who
submitted my name and particulars for this important
honor. I know Professor Dick Dunn, Chair of the English
Department played no small part in putting me forward,
so thank you, Dick, and thanks also to Molly Purrington,
Erin MacCoy, Marilyn Kliman and Karen Demorest—for
organizing my guests for this evening.

I want briefly to tell you who’s with me, because it’s
important to have them here. It’s not always easy for a
family to understand how it has generated a poet, and to
put up with the rather revelational exposure that often goes
along with this.

My younger sister, Stephanie Barber, is with me from
Bellingham. I’m lucky to have her because she loves and
reads poetry; it seems my love of poetry has become a little
contagious since her son and daughter both write poetry.
She’s been there for me through some crucial times in the
tenuous existence of being a poet and I thank her greatly for
providing me with that sense of being appreciated within
my family. This wasn’t always so, since my mother and
father were loggers and really didn’t understand what I was
trying to accomplish for many years.

Molly Radke was my schoolmate in Port Angeles and
she and I decided to make a stand in the big city of Seattle.
We’re still close friends and I consider this a lovely dividend
of my initial time here. She is, however, under a gag order
and won’t tell you anything about my behavior as a young
student here!

Susan Lytle, the painter, is also with me. Besides being
artists in our own right, we emotionally supported each
other while being mated with very famous men, she to
Alfredo Arreguin, the wonderful Seattle Mexican American
pattern painter, also an alumnus of the UW, and me
to a story writer fondly called at his death, “America’s
Chekhov,” Raymond Carver.

When I think back to my time starting out as a young
poet in this city, I realize how little I knew about how to
accomplish this. I was lucky
to have Robert Heilman as
my composition professor.
From him I sharpened up my
skills at logic, rhetoric and
grammar. In my last term as a
Freshman I managed to be
accepted into the last class
the Pulitzer Prize winning
poet Theodore Roethke ever
taught. Joan Swift was also in
that class with me and I’m so
glad she could join us. This
class so galvanized me that I
took as my mandate to try as
a teacher never to be boring,
for every moment in that classroom was dynamic. Thus you
have the portrait of me by my Syracuse student, Alice
Sebold in her book Lucky as her lyric poetry professor who
appeared at 8 a.m. bursting through the door singing an
Irish Aire a cappella in order to get the students into the
mood to study Yeats. Her remark later was that she decided
I was either brilliant or crazy. The audacity to do that
singing began here at the University of Washington.

. . . a life is for . . . giving the gift of one’s
spiritual and creative vitality for the good
of the community, even when you may
have things to say to that community
that they may not want to hear.

Susan Lytle will recall her husband, Alfredo, telling a
story about those young times of ours—his wanting to be
an artist and my wanting to be a poet. How one night in a
somewhat inebriated state with a friend, he traded one of
his paintings for a pair of boots and, on second thought,
asked an additional stupendous fee of ten dollars from the
friend. In the morning he discovered the boots did not fit,
but at least he had the kingly sum of $10. As a poet I could
not exchange even a poem for a pair of boots or $10. In fact
I still often get “copies” of the magazine as payment when I
publish. But being a poet and a young artist demanded an
initial revaluing of what a life is for: not for amassing
wealth, but for giving the gift of one’s spiritual and creative
vitality for the good of the community, even when you may
have things to say to that community that they may not
want to hear. For poetry and art and science are based on
asking the unasked and even the unaskable questions—what
nobody dared to think, to consider, to try, to propose.

This morning Dean Hodge brought together all those
receiving this important honor and he explained that teaching
in Arts and Sciences is now ‘question based,’ getting the
students to frame the important questions and then follow
out their inquiries. I read his excellent address of 2002 in
which he redefined the liberal arts education as ‘learning the
skills of freedom.’ I hope I have somehow imparted the
spirit of freedom in my 45 years of writing poetry. Indeed,
the biggest compliment I ever got from one of my best
young writers was: ‘thanks for giving me my freedom.’
Mind you he’d practiced many strictures, as I did, under
Roethke, for one has to learn to wear the tradition in order
to shed, renew and honor it.

I have taken note of Dean Hodge’s wish to teach thinking
outside the box. First, of course, one must define the
parameters of ‘the box’ and then unthink it. I sometimes
wonder if the cliche ‘thinking outside the box’ isn’t the
recipe for poetry, for I don’t believe I’m much capable of
very sustained episodes of other kinds of thinking.

The most important thing I did this past year was to
attend the Winter Retreat at Deer Park Monastery where
the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, also a wonderful
poet, was in residence. His example of being willing to
continue to come to America after the painful war in
Vietnam which brought so much destruction to his country,
has been such a beautiful example to me, so healing and
pointing toward a better way of living on the planet. Holly
Hughes and I took daily mindful walks with Thich Nhat
Hanh and meditated with him. This sojourn gave me hope
toward a more peaceful world, despite the current war in
which we find ourselves involved. Our impetus was not so
much ‘against war’ as ‘for peace.’ I think Thich Nhat
Hanh’s sentence: ‘Peace is every step’ can be an important
touchstone for us all.

I would like to conclude with a poem that tries to actually
put the reader into the proposition of considering a life
that might lie next to the life we are living. It is entitled:
“My Unopened Life.”

My Unopened Life

lay to the right of my plate
like a spoon squiring a knife, waiting
patiently for soup or the short destiny
of dessert at the eternal picnic—unsheltered
picnic at the mouth of the sea
that dares everything forgotten to huddle
at the periphery of a checked cloth spread
under the shadowy, gnarled penumbra
of the madrona.
Hadn’t I done well enough with the life
I’d seized, sure as a cat with
its mouthful of bird, bird with its
belly full of worm, worm like an acrobat of darkness
keeping its moist nose to the earth, soaring
perpetually into darkness without so much as
the obvious question: why all this darkness?
And even in the belly of the bird: why
only darkness?
The bowl of the spoon
collects entire rooms just lying there next
to the knife. It makes brief forays into
the mouth delivering cargoes of ceilings
and convex portraits of teeth
posing as stalactites of
a serially extinguished cave
from whence we do nothing but stare out
at the sea, collecting little cave-ins of
perception sketched on the moment
to make more tender the house of the suicide
in which everything was so exactly
where it had been left by someone missing.
Nothing, not even the spoon he abandoned
near the tea cup, could be moved without
seemingly altering the delicious
universe of his intention.
So are we each lit briefly by engulfments
of space like the worm in the beak of
the bird, yielding to sudden corridors
of light-into-light, never asking: why,
tell me why
all this light?

University of Washington English Department
Maintained by
Jennifer HoffLast updated 03/28/2005